Published papers

While the value of a founder’s emotional support is widely acknowledged, its impact on new venture performance remains underexplored. Advancing a culturally embedded view, we draw on East Asian contexts where emotional support from family and friends is culturally salient to propose that such support drives firm performance through the mechanism of relational indebtedness. Building on the optimal matching model, we construct a context-sensitive need-support-fit framework, examining how this relationship is moderated by support demand intensity and substitution availability, shaped by face logic. Using survey data from 2747 new ventures in China, Japan and South Korea, we find that emotional support is positively associated with new venture performance. This association is stronger for female and older founders, but weaker for founders with more leadership experience or incubator affiliation. This study advances entrepreneurship literature by revealing the firm-level impact of emotional support and the key contextual boundary conditions that shape its role.

In the period from 1994 to 2024, Japan’s family businesses matched or exceeded the returns of peers in the United States, Germany, and Canada while taking on far less risk. Their advantage came not from better forecasting but from a durable architecture: a clear philosophy, an ultra-long-term perspective, values embedded in operations, disciplined evolution, patient capital, and careful succession planning. Companies in different geographies and with different corporate structures can follow these same principles to better navigate uncertainty.

Western-based research suggests a modest influence of founders’ human capital on the business performance of new technology-based firms (NTBFs). Our exploratory, longitudinal study of 40 NTBFs in China, South Korea and Japan reveals that the human capital of their founders helps them to acquire executive talent, finance and customers, and thereby strongly enhances business performance. Furthermore, we find that East Asian NTBF founders leverage their human capital through networks with former colleagues and business partners in order to access key resources. These findings can be explained by cultural background factors such as social stratification and relational orientation.

How do professionals develop their identity when they become digital venture founders, and how does such identity affect their venture strategy? This article examines this understudied yet important question. The recent wave of digitalization has created opportunities for various professionals to participate in creating new firms. However, studies of professions and entrepreneurship to date have narrowly focused on professionals’ intrapreneurship efforts within professional service firms (PSFs). This inductive study of lawtech ventures in Japan examines the sources of Founder Social Identity (FSI). The study shows that founders’ professional role identity developed during prior work experience influences their identity work to become an entrepreneur; moreover, the resulting FSI shapes founders’ strategic decisions on market segment choice. This study highlights the significance of a distinct type of FSI, which we call ‘professional communitarian’, for professionals who engage in entrepreneurship beyond the boundary of PSFs.

This study of teleworking during the COVID-19 pandemic avoids a common self-selection bias by controlling for preferences and whether the introduction of teleworking was voluntary or mandatory. In a survey (n = 1,500) conducted in December 2020, we inquired about working arrangements and agent preferences in January, April, and December 2020. Productivity levels initially did not significantly differ for newly teleworking individuals after correcting for age, gender, marital status, breadwinner and management roles, childcare gap, area, job type, and general awareness, but were negatively affected by a preference mismatch (PM; around −3pp) and cognitive dissonance (not going with one’s preference in spite of having a chance to do so, adding another −5pp). By December 2020, individuals with a PM lost as much as 9pp of their productivity levels, but the net effect for those in partially remote work was only about −2pp. Similarly, stress levels initially did not differ for newly teleworking individuals using largely the same controls as before. By December 2020, stress levels for individuals newly undertaking fully remote telework were significantly lower than for the control group of individuals with unchanged working arrangements, but the PM contributed significantly to higher stress levels.

Use-of-the-past research has advanced our understanding of how top managers instrumentalize past knowledge, events and rhetorical constructions to advance their present-day interests. However, it is unclear how they use the past when they have divergent understandings of the past and different visions of the future. Temporal tensions can lead to a period of unsettlement in organizations, undermine the top management’s power base, and open up space for middle managers to take a central role in using the past. Through a longitudinal case study of a Japanese craft firm with a history of over 200 years, we examine how middle managers progressively take an active role in using the past through three processes: temporal mobility, temporal socialization and coalescing the past. Our findings challenge the somewhat linear conception of time in the use-of-the-past literature by elucidating the emergent, in-the-moment evolution of middle managers’ strategic use of the past. By adopting a process-analytic lens, our findings extend current understanding of the strategic use of the past as not undertaken by a few powerful individuals in a given moment, but a continually changing process enacted by multiple middle managers with different temporal orientations. Moreover, our findings contribute to the use-of-the-past literature by taking a relational perspective of temporality. Finally, we reconceptualize the strategic flexibility of middle managers from a temporality perspective, showing that they can alter the temporal orientations of those at the top and the bottom.

© 2019, Springer Nature Limited. Entrepreneurial ecosystems at the regional level have been intensively studied in Western countries, but much less so in East Asia. We study five major ecosystems located in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Suzhou, and Chongqing, focusing on the business conditions for information technology (IT) start-ups. Our domain analysis reveals that these entrepreneurial ecosystems differ in various important aspects from leading Western counterparts such as Silicon Valley. Furthermore, we find differences in the growth and internationalization of firms across entrepreneurial ecosystems in China, Japan, and South Korea. Public policy should focus on supporting high-potential start-ups and strengthening the ecosystems’ global outreach.

While research on new venture entrepreneurship has been predominantly conducted in Western countries, East Asian start-ups have gained global relevance in recent years. In this article, we systematically review studies on new venture entrepreneurship in East Asia published in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)-listed journals between 2000 and 2020 and find that the number of papers annually published has been rapidly increasing. However, the research body is highly unbalanced, as most articles are single-country studies focused on China, apply a quantitative methodology, and concentrate on topics such as entrepreneurial strategies and new venture entrepreneurs’ personal attributes and networks. Moreover, a majority of studies provides no or only a weak consideration of the national or subnational context. More strongly contextualized research on countries such as Japan and South Korea and on less studied themes such as culture, entrepreneurial financing, entrepreneurial teams, new venture internationalization and new venture entrepreneurial intention is desirable.

Most extant research on the performance implications of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has focused on established firms and on firm-specific and organizational factors. We contribute to EO research by studying the performance effects of EO sub-dimensions on the performance of new technology-based firms (NTBFs) and by examining environmental uncertainty, which is related to national institutional development, as an important boundary condition in an East Asian context. We analyze survey data from 2023 NTBFs in China, South Korea, and Japan and find that while the NTBFs’ performance is positively related to their entrepreneurial behavior, it is negatively related to their managerial attitude toward risk-taking. Furthermore, the positive performance effect of entrepreneurial behavior is weakened by environmental uncertainty, which is higher in China than in South Korea and Japan. Our findings suggest that for NTBFs, the performance implications of EO sub-dimensions need to be studied separately.

Expatriates reside under the paradoxical tension between global integration and local adaptation when the assignment is to implement a global strategy in a local context. This tension triggers complex emotions that expatriates need to regulate to perform. Although the link between the individual-level emotion and the firm-level strategy implementation is of utmost importance in a multinational corporate context, it remains under-researched to date. We therefore investigated what kind of emotions evoke under such tension and how the emotion results in organisation-level outcome. We conducted a 612-day ethnographic study of a new product launch project in a multinational corporation. As a result, we found that the global-local tension evoked mixed emotions among expatriates over time, and those emotions influenced the individual’s legitimacy in two phases: legitimacy seeking stage and legitimacy owning stage. These phases reiterated, and the repetitive cycle over time developed an emotional dynamic at organisation-level across the project team. We argue that expatriates’ actions and behaviours to regulate mixed emotions evoked by the global-local tension influence the way the individual’s legitimacy develops, as they change the interaction and the relationship among the actors. In turn, the individual-level legitimacy influences the organisation-level emotional dynamic and thus the performance.